SAP Business One as ERP for the Company going internationally

One of the questions that you have to answer is about global ERP infrastructure.  Here in the United States we have huge market for accounting software and it might be considered as self-contained meaning that software vendors can concentrate only on domestic market and do not care about outside world.  Or maybe they decide to cover only specific cluster of countries for example where English is used as the language of business.  Let’s try to organize this session in the form of questions and answers:

Q.  Is SB1 available in foreign languages?A.  Yes it is and you can associate the language with named user or switch them on the fly directly in the client interface.  It supports Unicode meaning hieroglyph based languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.  Just to open the list of languages we would like to name Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and German

Q.  Is it localized internationally?A.  Localization has two components such as foreign language support and specific country legislation compliance.  Translation is something not too difficult but compliance might have nuances.  In the next question we are talking about one of them

Q.  Here in the US we are on Great Plains and we are opening subsidiary in Campinas near Sao Paulo.  We plan simply to translate several forms to Portuguese in Modifier as we learned from one of the internet publications.  Does it sound like a good approach?A.  It looks like elegant solution to enable user interface in the foreign language.  Brazil however has complex requirements and one of them is SPED or Public Digital Bookkeeping where you have to report in XML format your tax related documents as well as financial statements.  Dynamics GP is not localized there and you may be in trouble of SPED reporting as well as complex taxation formulas.  Several years ago we saw the case similar to yours where multinational company on GP had to implement Business One for the facility in Amazonia.  They implemented SQL export from SAP into CSV files and then import via Integration Manager into Great Plains General Ledger.  Business One has SPED add-on which could be purchased through ISV channel

Q.  We acquired facility in Siberia in Russia.  We also use Great Plains in our headquarters in Toronto.  It is important for us to produce consolidated P&L and Balance Sheet in Microsoft Management Reporter (formerly we used FRx reporting trees).  We know that SAP B1 is available in Russian but we also heard that there are issues in producing Russian fiscal reports.  Could you share what you know?A.  We actually helped one of the Canadian multinational companies to translate GP to Russian in Modifier module.  As far as we know they use 1C Accounting local package to print fiscal reporting.  They simply do GL entry there for each transaction in Great Plains.  Fiscal Balance and other reports are complex to produce in SAP B1 as well and you are probably right.  It is difficult to say what is best and it is better to discuss pluses and minuses

Q.  We are preparing to international expansion.  Why don’t we just use high end SAP ERP?A.  The answer is often the software license cost and implementation time where Business One is cheaper and quick to be implemented

Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com.  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta Georgia, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA and Canada nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed).  We are working on Brazilian ERP consulting market in Sao Paulo since 2004